At ‘Discs and Machines–Sunny’s Gramophone Museum and Records Archive, 74 km from Kochi at Plassanal, owner Sunny Mathew takes out a record from a sleeve. Then he takes a small piece of cotton, dips it in liquid paraffin, and rubs the grooves. Cranking up the spring of the gramophone, he selects a steel needle, and plays Leo Stormont’s ‘Holy City’.
“In 1898, this song by composer Stephen Adams became one of the most popular religious songs in England. It is the oldest record in my collection,” says Mathew.The museum that recently celebrated its second anniversary has 250 gramophones of different shapes and designs. For example, a suitcase model has a handle and can be carried while travelling. Picnic gramophones are small and have been designed in a way that they can be folded into compact boxes. Cabinet models are freestanding like a piece of furniture.
This fascination for gramophones and records began in his childhood. His father had an HMV gramophone. “The sound of the songs was a wonder to me,” says the 63-year-old. “In fact, the Hindi songs by singers such as K L Saigal, Shamshad Begum, Noor Jehan, Pankaj Mallik and
C Ramchandra, which I heard then, are still my favourites.”
There are more than one lakh records in Indian and international languages. Recordings by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose are also there.
Mathew started collecting them by accident. One day, in the 1980s, he came across a 1930s floral horn type gramophone and some records, while travelling in Madurai.Once he began listening to music on this machine, he got hooked on to it. “And, there was no looking back,” says Mathew, who retired as a Divisional Manager, Kerala Forest Development Corporation, in 2012.
But he had to pay a steep price for his passion. The museum has been built at a cost of `50 lakh. To meet the expenses, he had to dip into his savings, gratuity and PF. Unfortunately, the returns are not that much. “But that’s because the entry is free,” says Mathew. Apart from Indians, the museum gets visitors from Europe, Australia, Singapore, and the USA.
These days, he is busy doing a project called the ‘Endangered Archives Programme’ for the British Library in London with wife Josia’s support. “I am digitising all records available till 1927. They will be uploaded on their website. It is a nice way to spend my retirement.”